Friday, July 11, 2008

Forget pollution, it's rain Beijing fears most

When the Sun rose over Beijing last Sunday morning, the city's parks were filled to bursting with residents eager to soak up a few rays. Thanks to the city's widely reported pollution problem, Sunday was first clear, sunny day in weeks.

We're not talking about a light shower or a steady drizzle here. At this time of year, Beijing is regularly doused in tropical-like downpours that bring outdoor activity to a halt. The usual pattern is for a downpour to hit the city between 2 and 4 in the afternoon on most days. But sometimes, the rain just keeps coming until nightfall and beyond.

With the three and half hour Olympic opening ceremony planned to start at 8.08pm on the 8th day of the 8th month (8 being the luckiest of numbers in Chinese culture), there is a very real chance that the ceremony will be ruined by rain.

This left organisers with a headache. The plan they came up with is to seed clouds heading for the stadium with silver iodide so that they dump their load in the mountains that surround the city. The city has set up a number of cloud seeding guns in these mountains for just this purpose.

Everybody else is more cautious. Cloud seeding has a long and controversial history. Nobody is sure whether it works or not, partly because you can never be sure if a cloud would have rained whether seeded or not.

But cloud seeding has another advantage for the Chinese authorities. In theory, rain can be used to wash pollution out of the atmosphere ahead of the games, thus killing two birds with one stone. Sure enough, last Sunday's blue sky day followed some unusually torrential rain in the city on Friday evening.

Last night, the city held its first dress rehearsal of the opening ceremony amid tight security (all workers have been sworn to secrecy). It looks as if the event remained dry. Whether that was the result of a naturally dry day or intervention from the Chinese cloud seeders, we may never know.

We can only hope the opening ceremony passes off without any adverse weather. But if it does rain, the Chinese may have only themselves to blame. Indeed, once you start fiddling with the weather, you're bound to be blamed whatever happens.

I fired up mu trusty luckometer and put it in analysis mode and found a problem with the date and time of the opening ceremony. Starting at 8:08PM is a problem because it is the 9th minute of the 21st hour of the day. I think to be safe, they should be starting the ceremony at a little after 07:07 and seven seconds AM.

My luckometer tells me that the 9th minute could be lucky because it sounds like a Chinese word for everlasting, however, this could be refering to the rain. Of course, 2008 is the 9th year of the century so, if everlasing does refer to the rain, they have a major problem.